One last visual ode to Brighton

Actually that's probably not true. I'm blatantly going to write and think and draw and create about Brighton lots more over the course of my life.

But still, leaving in under a month felt like a particularly fitting time to create these Brighton themed materials in my day job.

I work for Kings Education, a group of international colleges, and in May we're opening our newest location — in Brighton! (Which is fairly ridiculous given that our HQ has been based here all along, but ho hum, we're only just getting round to it!)

It's probably our biggest, most exciting college to date, in that it's an entirely new building built from scratch for the purpose (on the old Buxtons site near London Road/The Level, for Brighton locals with an interest in what's going on there).

We're recruiting both local and international students to study GCSEs, A-levels and other specialist vocational courses (as well as English language courses for the international students), but because we currently have no building with which to woo potential students, one of the meeting rooms in our office is being converted into 'the marketing suite', where international and local students alike can come and learn more about the new college before its launch.

We didn't want it to just be another drab office room, so we've snazzed it up with a few things, including some bespoke 'Kings Brighton' rock, some big prints of CGI views of the college on the wall, a soon-to-come custom made model of the building, and, most pertinently to this blog post, I've had a fun chance to create some large format graphics — a map for the wall, and a fun design for the surface of the meeting room table, centred around facts about Brighton. (And they're quite weird/obscure/interesting facts, so as to hopefully be interesting to local students who know the area well, as well as international students)

Here I am looking smug with my map and my table.

And here are some more shots to show them off.

Hard to capture the colours of the map wall with my iPhone and no daylight, but it’s a lovely lilac colour. It was produced as two layers of vinyl, the light purple of the streets, and then the white/colour of the annotations as a separate layer.

The table design has been applied as a vinyl, heat sealed to wrap around the edges. It looks even better than I had hoped, and has a lovely shiny finish. The table looks about 100x better than it did before! My print heroes Perfect Print did the install. Gonna miss them when I'm gone for sure, they've been so helpful and generous to me over the years.

The colours are drawn from a selection of colours that will be used to decorate the new college, so any students will hopefully see a correlation between this room and the building they eventually end up in.

It's been lovely to do a hand-drawn typographic project on such a big scale. I had a lot of fun with it.

Hopefully I can ask our photographer to take some better pictures of it all than these, to go on my website, but I figured I'd share these here while I'm still all excited about it!